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The caution was justified, but he kept the skepticism out of his face, replacing it instead with an almost-as-bad stoicism, a considering look around the entrance way as he obediently shed his boots and peeled off his disgusting socks.

He lined his boots up neatly next to her shoes, disregarded Fiona's irritated and sarcastic snort at the pang this caused him, and tried to tell himself that seeing it, seeing the cozy little house, seeing the warm wood and smelling what lingered of fresh paint and taking in the patches of grey, rain-streaked light thrown by the windows that must have been replaced by slanting sunlight on a better day but were, in their own way, painfully welcoming--he tried to tell himself that all of this was the hard part, and so the hard part was over. He could not, now, suddenly change his mind and say that they ought to trudge through the wet back to the dorms. Instead he swallowed the surge of mingled despair and envy and petty jealousy and want.

But wearing Konstantin Bashmet's clothes, picked up out of America Jones' laundry room, was not an indignity he could tolerate, and if he simply outright refused and sat there dripping wet no amount of old stories of vagrancy charges and half-hinted histories of falling asleep on the wrong park benches and, you know, habit could possibly conceal the truth of why he said no. She would know. He could already see the Jesus wept disgust and disappointment forming on her face behind his eyelids. It was not an argument he wanted to have.

He'd had the foresight to tuck his jeans into his boots; they'd barely managed a damp hem. Avoiding her eye he shrugged out of his coat and then peeled himself out of the wet layers of his shirts, silently telling himself over and over that it wasn't anything she hadn't seen before.

Except that it was, and he knew it: under someone else's eye, someone who had a lens for comparison, he felt as he did bare to the waist on the infirmary scale. He felt as though he would at any moment be accused of inhabiting a skin that was not his, strangely soft-edged, and although he was still painfully angular, his shoulderblades still jutting through skin that looked too thin, every rib delineated when he lifted his arms over his head, he at least no longer looked as though he'd missed his own interment by a few weeks.

Unthinkingly he glanced at his own tattoos, the one older, the one newer, and he reached for the dryer door and under the guise of scratching his burgeoning beard (still, still, even now) felt for the edges of the scar on his throat. Still his. Still familiar, despite the flat space where the hollow of his stomach should have been; still reassuring despite the too-firm shape of his own forearm, the invisible smoothness where two starkly-outlined bones ought to have been, the curve where his upper arm met his elbow that had once been simply a slack, fleshless angle of skin that had felt more right than this body ever did. Every touch of someone else's eyes was a ******** weight, felt. Before he'd only been ashamed by them. Now he was ashamed, and desperately craved the approval he felt sure that even now, trapped in someone else's body, he would not get.

"Is this thing hooked up?" he asked, opening the dryer. "Private ******** laundry. I ought to have tried to negotiate for that in my room." And then: "It looks nice. The house."

He'd almost relaxed, very nearly let it go, until she said that: then it was all tension again, all sudden stomach-twisting panic, and during the automaton walk to the refrigerator he tried to disable the sudden inexorable mental calculator tallying up what sort of damage even a bottle of beer could do to his rigorously-controlled intake.

He eyed the countertops, decided she'd kill him if he used them to open the bottles, and rooted cautiously through a drawer: one for him, one for her, which he carried into the living room (the parlor, whatever) and put down on the floor before dragging the projector in behind him.

He started to busy himself with it before all motivation winked out, destroyed; he was shivering and therefore refused on principle to hide behind the towel, instead gritting his teeth to still their chattering, waiting for her. He tentatively lifted his voice for her in the other room. "Tell them it's mine," he suggested, not sure why he did. "Just--until then."

He felt it: the relief at what felt to him like such an obvious solution, the loosening, the pang of why couldn't you just ******** ask me for a favor, and where he once might have recoiled (still wanted to recoil) he instead hugged her back. It was sudden and extremely out of character and he distantly heard himself saying I wish you'd just let me help you more and then he was reaching to yank aside the ridiculous burden between his bare chest and her body, intentions obvious to him at least, still shivering but he'd be warm enough in a minute, they'd both be--

--this was twice now. Twice, in one day. He tugged a blanket out of her hands and turned away from her, bundling himself up as though it were a shield, avoiding her under the guise of bending for her drink to hand it to her.

"I don't know how to work this ******** thing," he said quietly, jerking an elbow at the projector.

In the time it had taken her to get the thing working Taym had managed to reorient himself, to focus, to make a number of fervent silent promises to himself while he pretended to distract himself with his phone. By the time she settled in near him he'd prepared himself for it enough to neither flinch nor instinctively curl an arm around her, instead reacting not at all, which in its own way was as much a giveaway as his unexpressive silence at seeing the house in all its glory had been.

When he did speak it was to observe, cynically, that maybe they should have screened this one at Rep's impersonal and traumatic orientation. And then, apparently seeing no problem with talking during a movie (or whatever this was), feeling the need to point out that he'd spent more time watching movies in the past month than he had for probably the entire past two years of his life.

"I guarantee you," commented Taym darkly, "that Janice puts out." This was apparently endorsement of Janice as a dating prospect.

Taym was fidgety by the time Woody was depositing his date at the door, and finally a sort of indignant noise exploded from between his teeth at the film's idea of a successful close to the date.

"He didn't even try!"

Another offended noise, and then, after a couple of minutes, and grimly: "This kid is prime ******** Deus material."